Speed Up Your Lightroom Workflow

Editing photos after a shoot can be extremely time-consuming, especially if you have not spent some time optimizing your workflow. If you’d like to speed up your editing process, here’s a 5-minute video by Mango Street Lab with tips and tricks for culling, organizing, and editing photos.

It’s always interesting to see how other photographers use the tools that we use every day. Mango Street Lab have some techniques for speeding up the editing workflow.

Lightroom is the most familiar tool here, but try these techniques for speeding up their work in Adobe’s software. They create a new catalog for each shoot, and only import photographs that they have before culled using Photo Mechanic. Because Photo Mechanic renders previews faster than Lightroom, it is a handy for first pass-over a large collection of files. Photo Mechanic is quite pricey, so for those using Windows, XnView is a free alternative.

Within Lightroom they apply a preset on import. Also, they show the basic editing tools in the Library panel to make batch edits. They also generate Smart Previews for all images. This is especially useful when dealing with large RAW files on a slower computer.

The next piece of software, PFixer, allows you to set up custom shortcuts for just about every feature in Lightroom. Again, it is quite expensive at $99, but VSCO Keys is a free (and open-source) option that can be used instead. You can set up keyboard shortcuts to use instead of clicking and dragging the mouse in Lightroom’s edit panels. You could take this to the next level with PFixer’s hardware controllers or by building your own with a MIDI controller.